Cloudia - Weather Cloud With Bluetooth Audio

I saw a lot of cloud projects out there wanted to add some spice to it, so decided to add some Bluetooth Audio Streaming, Weather Updates and Lightning Simulation using EL wire.

Step 1: Parts

Paper Lanterns - Any number depending on the size you wanna build, I'm using 3, white color preferred.

Polyester fiber - Also depends on the size of the cloud, I used about a kilogram

Glue Stick and Glue Gun

Wires

Resistors and Transistors

12V White LED Modules - 3nos

12V Yellow LED Modules - 1nos

EL inverter

White EL Wire

Portable Speaker

USB Sound Card

Power Supply

Proto Shield

EL Escudo dos

MIC module

Intel Edison

Soldering and Tools

Step 2: Making the Cloud and the Hardware

Glue all the Lanterns together and apply hot glue and start pasting the polyfill over it.

Do it till you are happy with the shape.

Getting into the Electronics:

I Soldered all the components into the protoshield, See the attached Fritzing image for the connections ;)

Step 3: Some Coding

I'll be using the Intel Edison and both Arduino and Python for programming.

The Arduino Sketch is the used as the main program and the python for subroutines to fetch Weather data and to turn off the Edison module.

For the Weather Updates I'm using python version of Open Weather Map pyOWM.

SSH into the Edison and enter the commands as in attached snippet.

*Copy the Shutdown.py and Weather.py to root folder /

Next will be configuring the Edison to receive audio and play it in Speaker via USB sound card.

Check if your sound card is detected using cat, follow the procedure to turn on bluetooth and scan for your device follow the snippets for clarity.

Now we have the source and sink lets sync them.

I also wrote a tiny shell script to run on boot so the sketch starts running on startup.

For Startup script

cd /etc/init.d

vi startup.sh

#!/bin/sh
/sketch/sketch.elf /dev/pts/0&

*save and exit

root@edison:/etc/init.d# chmod +x startup.sh

root@edison:/etc/init.d# update-rc.d startup.sh defaults

now upload the arduino code and poweroff, next time you power on the sketch will run automatically.

Now place everything into the lantern and secure them with zip ties.

Step 4: Tada

And Finally Lift the cloud and hang it any where you like, don't forget to close the top and the bottom of the lantern.

I streamed music from my Tegra Nota and I loved it! watch the video to see how the cloud reacts to sound.

P.S I have also have planned upgrades like voice recognition, PIR sensor, and some blue fairy lights to simulate rain effect ;)

Cheers